Intel’s new Moblin alpha release boots super fast

Intel has released the second alpha of Moblin 2, an open source Linux-based …

Intel has announced the availability of the second Moblin 2 alpha release. This version delivers extremely impressive boot performance, broader hardware compatibility, updated software components, and a few other noteworthy enhancements.

Moblin is Intel's Linux-based software platform for mobile devices. The platform is open source and is being aggressively optimized to deliver the best achievable performance on Atom-based hardware products. Intel publicly launched Moblin in 2007 and invited third-party developers to participate in the effort. The first Moblin-based devices, which are primarily MID products like the Gigabyte M528, began shipping last year.

Intel is currently working on version 2, the next-generation of the Moblin software platform. Moblin 2 will deliver even better performance and a rich user interface that leverages Clutter, an open source canvas and animation framework developed by OpenedHand, a software startup from the GNOME ecosystem that Intel acquired last year.

The first Moblin 2 alpha release arrived in January, with an Xfce-based environment and basic support for a small handful of Atom-based netbook devices. The latest alpha takes the platform another step forward.

Xfce, which is largely a placeholder that will be swapped out for a richer Clutter-based environment in the future, has been updated to version 4.6, which was released earlier this month. According to the release notes, the developers have also added support for kernel modesetting and compatibility with additional hardware, including the MSI Wind.

The most remarkable characteristic of this release is the startup time. Linux hardware site Phoronix, which tested the alpha 2 release on an Atom-based netbook with a solid-state drive, has published a video demonstration and a bootchart graphic which show that the whole system fully booted within only 16 seconds.

The bootchart breakdown is astonishing. Phoronix points out that Xorg was up and running a mere three seconds into the boot process and that the Xfce environment is up and running in seven seconds after the boot starts. These numbers remind me of the startup time that I used to get out of BeOS back in the day.

I tested alpha 2 in VirtualBox using an installable live image (note to VB users: you will have to enable PAE for your VM to get it to work). As I described in my review of the first alpha, Moblin 2 is currently a Fedora-based Xfce environment with a few extras such as the Pimlico PIM suite. The focus of development is still primarily on performance and hardware compatibility. The user-visible layers of the platform will likely improve significantly when Moblin 2 is more mature.

Users can download the new alpha from the Moblin test drive page. In addition to the installable live image, there are also disk images available for KVM and VMWare.